Dimensionality Reduction Methods in Genetics and Epigenetics

Eran Halperin

ICSI and Tel Aviv University

Thursday, July 23, 2015
4:00 p.m., ICSI Lecture Hall

I will give an overview of our methods for ancestry inference from genetic data using dimensionality reduction techniques. I will then discuss the relation of these methods to the correction of statistical analysis of genome-wide association studies, in which genetic data of cases and controls are tested for correlations with phenotypes. Finally, I will discuss some recent results on the application of dimensionality reduction techniques to methylation studies, in which the genome-wide methylation levels are measured for cases and controls and are then compared with a phenotype.

Bio:

Eran Halperin is an associate professor in Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Science and in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology. His research focuses on the intersection between genetics, algorithms, and statistics. Specifically, he is developing computational and statistical methods for the analysis of human genetic data in the context of disease studies. He received his doctorate in theoretical computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 2001, after which he held postdoctoral and research associate positions in the Computer Science Departments of UC Berkeley and Princeton from 2001 to 2004.  He joined ICSI's Algorithms Group in 2005 as a senior researcher. From 2007 to 2008, he also served as the director of bioinformatics at Navigenics, a personalized genomics company. He has received many awards for his research, among them the Intel prize for PhD, the Checkpoint prize for PhD, a Rothschild postdoctoral fellowship, and the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research.